The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention. However, it should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgment or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the application.
People are increasingly mobile. It is not uncommon these days for a person to travel through multiple countries in short periods of time. Where the change in geographical location is to an isolated area or developing country, communication with the traveller may be problematic.
To address the first issue mentioned above, it is common for people to either activate international roaming on their mobile phone or, if they are a regular visitor, to obtain a mobile phone more suited for communication in the geographical location concerned. However, international roaming is a costly solution for the traveller. While having multiple mobile phones may reduce call charge costs, it does introduce additional problems associated with multiple mobile phones (such as which phone is ringing, additional weight and space). It also means in most instances that the person trying to contact the traveller must know where they are in order to know which phone to call them on.
A further problem exists when a person relocates from a developing country or an isolated area to a new country—for example to seek a better living. In this situation, it is likely to be problematic for friends and family to be able to keep in touch with the person, but more so for economic reasons than technical reasons.
A past solution to this particular problem has been to ship a special phone to the relocated person. This special phone is provided under contract to the relocated person and the contractual payments are charged to the relocated person's credit card. While this system allows friends and family to keep in contact with the relocated person, it introduces two new problems in that: a) the ability to communicate is tied specifically to that special phone and cannot be assigned or otherwise transferred to a new phone; b) it is not possible to communicate with the special phone through messaging systems such as the short messaging system (“SMS”).
In seeking to address both problems, travellers and relocated persons have turned to Voice over Internet Protocol systems. Some of these systems, such as Skype™ allow for message communication as well as voice communication. However, while VoIP systems have the flexibility to provide reasonably stable voice communication regardless of the location of the traveller/relocated person or the device they are using to communicate with—they are dependent on the ability for at least one communicating party to be able to access a broadband internet service. This may not be possible in isolated areas or developing countries where general computer penetration, let alone internet penetration, is low.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system for communicating with a single mobile communications device having multiple MS-ISDN identifiers in a manner that overcomes, or at least alleviates in part, both of the problems mentioned above.